Yeah buddy!

Yesterday was awesome! I took a laptop to the library and typed till my head was swimming. Then I walked around a little bit, came back and wrote a while longer, because apparently my mind wasn't done, yet. *g*

Kate was confused about some motivations, and found a couple of typos. She's really interested in Tran, who disappears from the book after chapter one, so it's not that important to know him that well.

I typed a couple of pages on the Kelsey and Grandma Opal go into the bomb shelter, pages I've been meaning to get to but haven't. It felt great! I even named the cat on the run and decided to keep the name because it's cute and fits a seaside town: Skiff.

Then I closed the laptop and pulled out my bowling pencil to make notes, and wrote a whole nuther half page! Awesome! And you know, I whiz away typing in this blog and the language is easy to read and not stilted. I'm still trying to learn how to JUST TYPE when I'm writing so I can approach the same level of easy confidence. Because when I'm WRITING, the words become cramped and lame and often don't make sense. I *like* to read my journaling, but sometimes reading my fiction is painful. My biggest goal - after actually FINISHING the book - is to achieve that easy going nature in my fiction. I believe Kate called it, "Lean and mobile, so it reads fast".

Further down the blog I see I was writing about putting a really cool and confident character in the situation of Zombie Apocolypse, and it suddenly occurs to me that I have done that, briefly. I don't even remember his name, but when I re-wrote Dead City in that screenwriting class, there was a guy in it who took to apocolypse like a duck to water. So what happened to him? I killed him to end the prologue. ;-)

Chapter One

I sent the not-really-finished chapter one to Kate last week and have been kicking myself ever since, because it's so unfinished it's basically a pile of crap. Still, she's so used to dealing with clueless undergrads who are unable to write in their native language that she was very kind to my rough effort. She made some EXCELLENT suggestions, and pointed out some goofs that - after she pointed them out - were pretty obvious.

Of course I forgot to bring my laptop today, and I'll be spending a couple of hours at the library tonight. I'll probably borrow one of the Kinesiology laptops, because there's no way I want to write by hand.

Tonight I will work on revision of the two chapters I have ninety percent done, and I will write as much of chapter three that I can. Chapter one of course has to be the grabber. Parker is the right character to sell the book to its expected readers - boys. But Kelsey is the more interesting character to me of course. Still, I'm getting along with Parker pretty well. The one character I'm most interested in that I can't really continue is Tran. He's cool and confident, and I think it would be neat to see what that kind of character does in this situation. Maybe a later work...

Last night I did something I should have done a lot sooner: back up my work. Duh! Now it's on my flash drive and my desktop at home. You would think a person who is considered a "computer guru" would be better about doing that.

Waste of Time

That's what this weekend was, writing-wise. I'm beginning to have a difficult time writing. When I'm to this point, the novel is pretty whole in my head and I lose interest in it. Of course that makes it difficult for other people to read it. ;-) I couldn't even FIND my briefcase this weekend, and didn't see it from Friday evening until Birdie brought it out the door with her this morning on the way to work.

It was a really, really busy weekend, so I'm tired, and I hurt my knee somehow on Saturday working on the garbage dump behind the garage at my house down south. I didn't realize how far down the damned garbage goes. I scraped off about two inches of top soil and still found broken glass. And I only pushed the pile back about two feet. There're five more feet to go, and it's deeper farther in. Now I think I may get the house ready by July for sale.

Anyway, I really need to get on chapter three. I just scribbled down the basic description of the clown zombie, and that's the only writing I've done in three days. I read this morning that the Oprah Book Club is doing "The Road", which is on my Amazon Wish List because it's a post-apocolyptic novel. I read the exerpt on the book club's site and nearly fell asleep. You know, as much as I envy writers' ability to wax poetic and all that, I can't read that crap. So you KNOW I'm not writing that way. I compared my spare piece of prose with that and felt pretty weak.

Fuck it, though. This is all about getting it done, not winning a prize. I've already gotten tired of the story, but I want to get it finished just so I know I can do it.

Fast, fast, fast!

That's how this day has gone. I've been busy for the first time in weeks, doing brain-deadening work involving spreadsheet formulas, copy/pasting graphs into Word documents...

(glyph of zombie face)

I've written exactly one sentence today, just before the technology committee meeting began. Maybe I'll get some done at home tonight. *snort* Yeah. Right.

Trouble Averted

This morning was a minor breakthrough. I didn't feel like writing, not one little bit. I got the girls out, made coffee, sat on the couch staring blankly at the morning news show, all the while berating myself for wasting time and not writing anything.

Right in the front of my notebook are large, black slogans dashed off when I began: Write Every Day! Even If It's Just A Paragraph! Even If It's Crap! So, I made myself pick up my briefcase and get out chapter two and my pen. Put them on the couch and got coffee and cereal. Picked them up when I was finished with breakfast.

I still didn't want to do it, and was actually feeling quite petulant when I put pen to paper. I fully expected to see that pen sitting without moving. I kept waiting for the tv news to draw me back in.

But it didn't happen! The pen started moving. I scratched out some words and started adding some down the margin. Kelsey and her Grandma Opal are in the back yard and GO has just asked her if she is indeed a lesbian when the huge, normally immobile neighbor bursts out of the house and "runs" across the street, screaming out a warning. I had forgotten that the "chapter two" I had on the flash drive was actually a quick sketch and not actual prose. Duh. So I started cleaning that up and before you know it, a half hour has gone by and I had to put down the pen.

Whoo Hoo! That felt GOOD, man. I'm going to type that up as soon as I post this, then I guess I'll get to work. ;-)

Big Gulp

I was playing with the title again yesterday and came up with The Second Coming of the Grim Rheeper, which sounded cute at the time, but still doesn't do it for me.

It was a big day. Dean Wilkerson came over and gave me a puzzler of a spreadsheet job to do RIGHT NOW, which I will tackle in a moment. Up to then, I had been alternating counting out evaluations and writing the end of chapter one. Got a LOT done, which made me feel better after the slacker weekend. It's true what I tell people about "writer muscles". Writing is like exercising. The more you do it, the easier it gets. (And since softball season starts in eight days, I really should consider some exercising. Ahem.)

But THEN - I sent chapter one to Kate. What a scary friggin moment that was. And then I saw a truly inane sentence at the end of the chapter and felt like a moron. *sigh* She might be able to give me a quick critique today before travelling.

Crap and more crap

Life on the house recovery front is a huge heaping pile of steaming shit. I intend to NOT let that stand in the way of finishing this book, which still doesn't have better than a working title, though I came up with a cutsie name for the comet last Friday. Dana is pulling his crap again. He stood in the kitchen yesterday and essentially mocked me for fixing up the house. He insisted that no one who could afford the amount I'm asking for it is going to do anything but raze it and build a new house on the existing basement.

Yeah, that made for a really nice trip home.

Saturday morning for about five minutes was the only work I managed to devote to the book. I had an idea, and even though we were supposed to be leaving for work at the house, I grabbed my bowling pencil and the legal pad and scribbled madly for a few minutes. Basically it's more on the Kelsey and Grandma Opal get the warning scene.

I also figured out why Parker thinks his mom may have survived the apocolypse. She's one of those people who bought the Homeland Security gas mask and duct tape. If I ever finish this one and write the sequel, she may turn up somewhere.